“Clear as spring water,” Hugh said. “I knowed he couldn’t get you.”
“Did you—”
“I jerked back on the chain just when he let off at you. It don’t take a lot to bust it sometimes.”
Son pressed his hand against his side and felt the wetness run between his fingers.
“How bad is it?” he said.
“I reckon the ball’s still in there, but it ain’t deep. I’ll get some cobweb back in them trees and catch up the mule and then we’re going swimming.”
The trusty climbed down from the oak and stood several feet from them. The rain clicked steadily on his straw hat.
“I can’t go back there,” he said.
“That’s right, but you ain’t going nowhere with us,” Hugh said.
“I only had two years to go. You done all this.”
“You don’t think too good, do you?” Hugh said. “I just as soon kill you like I done him. You best go after that horse while you got the chance and head for Mississippi. But you remember one thing. If we run across you again, or if you give the law a sniff of where we’re at, I’m going to finish you the way Wiley Harpe used to do it. I’ll gut you like a fish, fill your insides with rocks, and sink you in the river.”
The trusty looked at the insane light in Hugh’s black marble eye and began walking down the river in the sharply etched tracks of the riderless horse.
“I don’t know if I can swim it,” Son said.
“There’s a narrow place two miles down from here. We’re going to hold onto that mule’s tail and go right across it. Then we ain’t stopping till we see Texas.”
“Get the cobweb, Hugh, and let’s get out of here.”
The river narrowed just before it made a mile-wide bend with a steamboat landing on the far side. There were sandbars in the middle of the current with willow trees on them, and the bleached wreck of a flatboat lay on its side against the distant line of flooded cypress. Son tied the jumper tightly around his wound, unlaced his boots, and hung them around his neck.
“I don’t know if I told you this,” Hugh said, “but in Kentucky they don’t teach you how to swim. If I slip off that mule’s tail, don’t come after me.”
“You crazy old sonofabitch. This is a hell of a time to tell me that.”
“Boy, we ain’t got too many selections in the matter.”
They whipped the mule into the water, then pushed at its rump until it stumbled off the shelf of mudbank into the current. Its eyes were wide with fright, its teeth bared and its nostrils dilated for air above the eddies swirling around its neck.
“Swim, you old shitpot, or you drown with us,” Hugh said.
They held onto its tail with one hand and fought to keep their heads above the water with the other. Son’s boots felt like iron weights hanging from his neck, and he thought he could feel the pistol ball grating against a rib each time he swung out his free arm. Up the river, he heard the whistle of a steamboat; then it came into view, low and massive and gleaming whitely in the rain.
“That’s our luck, ain’t it?” Hugh said. “They’ll probably stop and try to pick us up.”
The mule reached the first sandbar in the middle of the current, and kicked its way up out of the shallows as soon as they let go of its tail. They lay on the sand, their faces on their arms, their chests heaving. Son twisted the jumper tighter on his wound, and a spiderweb of pink ran down his side.
“Two hundred more yards,” Hugh said. “Then we ain’t got nothing to worry about except cottonmouths and mosquitoes.”
“He’s going to come after us. You know that, don’t you?”
“He’ll do that, all right. But it’s a different game now. He don’t have the edge no more.”
They went into the water with the mule again, and as the dessicated wreck of the flatboat on the far bank came nearer, Son looked up the river at the huge paddle-wheeler approaching them, the smoke blowing off its scrolled stacks, the latticework on the upper deck splashing with rain, and he wondered at all the wealth inside, the grand salons where fortunes in cotton were won and lost with a casual throw of a playing card.
“Forget about it. The likes of us ain’t ever going to ride in something like that,” Hugh said.
When the mule’s hooves hit bottom and its shoulders suddenly rose from the water’s surface, Son felt something tear loose inside him like a black marble rolling into a socket of pain. The mule’s tail slipped out of his hand, and the soft brown current moved over his head and filled his ears with a quiet hum. He opened his eyes once and saw that life was simply an infinite green expanse of light that he could breathe as easily as a fish.
Hugh’s rough hand broke the water and pulled his head up by the hair.
“We done made it, Son,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? We ain’t going to see Jesus for a long time yet.”
Chapter two
By the next morning his side was aflame, and a black fluid leaked from his jumper and ran down into his dirty breeches. He held onto Hugh’s waist to keep from falling off the mule’s rump, and when he closed his eyes he heard the rain ticking in the trees overhead.
They were deep into a green woods, and the mist hung in pools around the trunks of the oaks. Last night they had ridden for several hours on a road under a smoky moon, but at the first gray light on the horizon they had moved back into the woods again, and now they were not sure where they were. In fact, in the dark they couldn’t be sure that they had continued riding westward.
Late that afternoon Son heard the cicadas begin humming in the trees. He looked upward and saw the limbs sweep over him, then felt his body topple backward off the mule’s rump. He landed in the wet leaves with his arms spread out by his sides. Hugh knelt over him and bit a chew off his tobacco.
“You just can’t make it like this, can you?” he said. “Look, it opens up down yonder, and we can’t go no farther in these convict clothes. We passed an empty nigger cabin back there, and I’m going to have to leave you there while I go get us a few things.”
“Maybe you better take off, Hugh. They’re behind us someplace.”
“They’re a long way behind us. If I figure right, we’re about halfway to Opelousas, and after that the Sabine is just down the pike. Get your foot in my hand and set your butt up on that mule.”
That night Hugh left him in the cabin and rode back toward the edge of the woods. Son slept on the dirt floor under the portion of cabin roof that hadn’t caved in, and in his feverish dreams he saw a gargoyle face screaming without sound from a twisted chain.
It had stopped raining and the false dawn showed through the cabin window when he heard horses in the leaves outside. He sat upright, his hand on his side and his heart beating, and stared hard at the frame of gray light through the cabin door.
“Boy, you either bled yourself white or I scared religion into you,” Hugh said. He held a cloth sack in his hand, and behind him Son saw two horses tethered to the root of an oak tree.
“Where you been?”
“At a settlement about five miles south. I got everything we need, including two horses from Andy Jackson’s soldier boys.”
“You stole horses from the army?”
“You damn right I did. I took a redcoat ball in my leg at Chalmette in 1815 for him and I reckon he owes me that much. Them soldier boys was drunk in the tavern, and I walked their horses right down the road while they was rolling dice for drinks.”
“I can’t ride no more, Hugh.”
“Yes, you can, because I’m going to whittle that ball right out of your side. Look what I got in the bag. There was two stores down the pike from the tavern, and I got into the back of both of them.” He loosened the drawstring on the bag and took out a huge knife with a bone handle and a whetstone in the buckskin scabbard, three slabs of cured bacon, a wax-sealed jar of honeycombs, a jar of molasses, two shirts and pairs of trousers, two straw hats and a bottle of clear whiskey. “But look what I found under the counter. It’s an old one, but you can put the ball in a pig’s snout at twenty yards with it.”